The Passion of the Christ was unusual and controversial for many reasons. All of the speech was in three languages that were spoken at the time of Jesus: Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The movie spent a lot of time showing details of the suffering and death of Jesus, with lots of violent scenes. Mel Gibson said that this was a realistic showing of what happened, though others thought it showed too much violence.

Jewish groups objected to the movie because it showed the Jewish leaders arranging to have Jesus killed....which they did. They said that this would cause people to think that modern-day Jews were guilty because of this and increase antisemitism, however this did not happen. The movie makers said that this was not their intention, but this did not stop the objections.

Mel Gibson was unable to get support from movie studios for this movie, and so supplied the money for it (around $25 million) mostly himself. The movie made much more money than expected -around $370 million.